Terminal City Tabletop Convention Retrospective – 2024

It’s a few days after another great convention experience, so let’s talk a little bit about Terminal City Tabletop Convention – 2024.

This year, it was held at the Vancouver Convention Centre which is right on the water in downtown Vancouver. It’s a beautiful site, and also the same venue as SHUX was held in…I don’t remember the last one (hey, let’s link to a blog post that might refresh the memory).

They didn’t reserve as much space as SHUX, obviously, but it was still much better than 2023 where space was so much at a premium that we went to get food in shifts because we couldn’t afford to give up our tables.

They also avoided the Daylight Savings Time weekend, which meant that we didn’t lose an hour of sleep while trying to attend.

So a win-win!!!

The thing I like about the Convention Centre is that it’s a 20-minute walk for me. It gives me good exercise but it’s also not too far away.

Of course, I’m not taking my huge bag of games like I did last year, but they have a great library and I have friends who bring a bunch of games (they’re driving from further away) so that’s also a win-win!

And I still got one of my games played, so a win-win-win!

There are plenty of food options in the Waterfront Centre food court, which makes eating pretty easy. Though you technically can’t bring outside food and drink into the hall, which makes things difficult.

Didn’t mean others didn’t do it (and I think I brought the remains of a bottle of pop in on Saturday and maybe Friday night), but it’s policy apparently.

I don’t remember that being an issue with SHUX, but maybe it was?

(Edit: I’ve since been informed that it was a policy imposed by the Convention Centre)

Another new thing this year was that the convention was open from 3:00 on Friday until Sunday. Previously it was only Saturday & Sunday.

That was great!

There was some miscommunication about when it opened, though. They said that it opened at 3:00 pm, but then it came out that you could pick up your badge at 2:00.

A lot of people thought that meant that you could get in at 2:00.

Nope! You could line up to pick up your badge, but then you had to leave again and line up to get in at 3:00 pm.

Nothing too major, but a little annoying.

Overall, though, kudos to those volunteering and running the con, as (from my perspective, anyway), it went off without a hitch.

How were the games?

Let’s talk about Friday-Sunday games played!

I assume so!

Let’s get started, as there are a lot to talk about!

First, I do want to say that, much like my OrcaCon post, I’m going to not give a lot of detail in how games play, even the new to me ones.

That’s for my April “New to Me – March” post!

But I will give a bit of an overview.

Friday was, of course, truncated, but I still managed to get some stuff in around dinner.

The first game played was Amalfi: Renaissance!

A friend brought it and wanted to play it, and since it’s on my Top 50 games of all time list, there was no way I was saying no.

Unlike my first play of it, I did very, very poorly.

I didn’t get ships built which meant all four of my rounds were very limited.

I spent a lot of time watching my two friends do things after I had passed.

While the game was fun (it’s always a blast!), that part was not fun.

Even though I did poorly, it was still a really fun game.

Still in my faves.

The second game, after dinner, was a new to me game from 2014 called Rise to Power.

This is a game that I’ve never heard of, and it’s a 10-year old game!

Does that mean anything?

Maybe.

This is a tableau city-building game where you are acquiring contracts to build city districts, but then you have to spend Prism (don’t ask) in order to power them.

You acquire two contracts on a turn, and then you can take two actions, which means either spending Prism cards to power them, or perhaps drawing more Prism cards.

If you have the same type of contract (like the two Hinterland contracts above), then you can actually upgrade the district as long as the highest-cost district is on the bottom.

And you get all of the points on all of the cards!

There were some rules issues (my friend hadn’t played it in years so we were kind of learning it on the fly) but overall it wasn’t a bad game.

Not something I’d clamor to play again, but I wouldn’t mind playing it again now that we have more of the rules right in our heads.

Who knows?

It may suck after that.

But right now we don’t know…

To cap off Friday night we played a game that I’ve played tons of in the last couple of weeks, but this time with one of the expansions!

Oh My Goods is a card game where the cards are used both as the buildings you might build, the resources you need to build those buildings, or as goods that are produced by those buildings.

It makes a great lunchtime game, which is why we’ve played it 4 times in the last 2 weeks.

However, this time we played with the Longsdale in Revolt expansion,

This adds event cards, changes a few of the rules, and does add some length to the game.

New buildings are pretty interesting, and some of the scenarios require strength, which is where the new Watchtower buildings come in.

Thankfully, you’re not penalized for not having strength. It just enables your neighbours to get more goods.

It’s an interesting expansion. It does make it so it probably wouldn’t really fit our office lunches anymore, though I guess that could be because it was new.

More plays might solve that problem.

I liked it, though!

After that, I made the 20-minute trek up the hill to home and bed, ready to get there bright and early for Saturday morning.

I got to the food court around 8:20 and had a Tim Horton’s Steak & Egg biscuit (which is way too messy for my tastes, but it was good) and then got in line for the 9:00 entrance.

Saturday is the long day, which is always awesome!

I had something going on at 1:00 and some people still hadn’t arrived, so three of us pulled out a fun new (and quick) card game, Sea Salt & Paper.

This is a really cool set collection (kind of) card game. You take a card either from the top of the deck or one of the two discard piles and then you can play cards to the table in front of you.

Playing certain pairs will get you a point and let you do something (like take another turn, or steal a card from an opponent) while the set collection stays in your hand. You can’t play those.

Which means a card can be stolen!

At some point, a player either says “Stop” and the round ends, scoring cards on the table and in your hand, or you might make a bet that you have more points than anybody else.

That can involve different scoring.

If the deck runs out before anybody stops it, then the round ends with nobody scoring.

I really enjoyed this one!

Another great lunchtime game that I might have to invest in some day.

More people arrived, and even though we didn’t have a ton of time, we decided to break out Kanban: Driver’s Edition, the Vital Lacerda game about making cars.

The teach is long in this one so we were running up against our scheduled event time (which included going to get lunch before it started!), but we got to the first meeting and basically played enough that we had the rules down (for the most part).

Let’s talk about this one later…

After lunch (honey chicken and rice, mmmmmmm), it was time for the event of the day (for me, at least), the 16-player Challengers tournament!

This was organized by some friends of mine and it was a lot of fun.

This is basically a more advanced game of War, but in a tournament setting with some deckbuilding mechanics in between individual games.

You have a starting deck of cards, and you are playing War against an opponent, basically.

One player plays the top card of their deck to the table. The other player keeps playing cards until their total strength beats what their opponent has.

When your card is knocked out, it goes to Bench (the side of the board) and you start drawing cards to beat your opponent’s new strength.

Some cards have powers that take effect when you play them, or maybe when they’re on the bench, or maybe in relation to cards you have on the bench.

The game ends when either a player can’t play a card or when they can’t place a card on their bench because there are already six types there (you put cards of the same type on top of each other, so they don’t take up an additional space).

Do this multiple times against all of the participants, while in between getting one or two cards from decks A, B, or C (B and C decks have more powerful cards) to put into your deck. You can also get rid of as many cards from your deck as you want.

You don’t want too many different types because then your bench will fill up very quickly. But you don’t want too few cards in your deck or you will run out quickly and not be able to play.

Once you’ve finished playing everybody, whoever has the most points (gained by winning match trophies or sometimes between or during games) is the winner.

In the 16-player tournament, the expansion was used as well for the other 8 players. Then the winner of our 8-player tournament played the winner of the other 8-player tournament for a final victor.

Needless to say, that wasn’t me.

But it was a fun activity, and only took about an hour. If I had been taking part in the final round, it may have taken 5-10 minutes more at most.

This is very quick.

Definitely fun at a convention!

And I wouldn’t say no if it came out to a large game day too.

Though you are getting up and moving chairs a lot as you face new opponents.

So be ready for that.

Once that was done, a few of us ended up playing a 2023 game that I have never heard of.

Delta is a kitchen sink game where you name a mechanic, it has it. Ok, maybe not worker placement?

That may be an exaggeration, but it didn’t feel like it.

It has some map exploration in it, some track movement (moving up the gear track), and also some set collection of animal pictures.

During each of the six rounds, you’ll be playing one of your cards to one of the three areas of the board. Each area requires one card during the round, so once you’ve played to the Exploration area, you can’t play there again this round.

Playing the cards might give you resources, it might give you balloons that will help you explore, or maybe the symbols that let you take tiles that will help you along, or maybe give you victory points.

The science side has endgame scoring tiles that you can take while the gear side has tiles that will help you during the game, either giving you another animal picture or maybe an extra explore action.

I’ll talk more about the game in my New to Me post, especially about the exploration track and such, but suffice to say that it was a fun game, but took a bit too long for what it is and doesn’t really add anything.

I’d definitely play it again, but I won’t be clamoring to.

Now it was time for some quick card and party games!

Yes, I did kind of skip dinner…whoops.

Surfosaurus Max is a kind of cooperative card game where players get points and try to win.

How does that work?

More detail in that future post, but basically each player is playing two cards in a round, in player order (one at a time).

Once all cards are on the table, you take the highest 5-card poker hand (except only a few different options) that can be formed out of the cards played.

None of this 2-3 card pair/set bullshit.

You have straight flush, straight, flush, 5 of a kind, and high card (not in that order, as it’s by memory).

If your card is taking part in that hand, then you get the full coconut points on the card you played!

If somebody has basically the same card as you (like a 5 in a straight, for example), then it could be either of your cards taking part.

You only get the half-coconut points.

After a certain number of rounds (or when the deck runs out…who can remember?), total up your points and whoever has the most is the winner!

Ok, I guess I’m not saving anything for that future post.

This is a short, fun little card game. Nothing more than that. I’d definitely play it again, but don’t need to.

Then it was time for a party!

A Blob Party, that is.

This is a cooperative word game where you draw a category and a word, and then everybody has to secretly write down a word or phrase (but since you’re trying to match, why would you put a phrase?) that matches everybody else and matches that clue.

If you match with anybody, you gel together into one bigger blob!

This means that next time, you get to talk with your new teammates about your answer, most of the time just individually writing down something and then looking at each other’s answer, then deciding which one to use.

But it doesn’t have to be that way!

Most likely it will be, though, since you can’t really talk much without giving it away to the other players.

The goal is to have everybody in the same blob by the end of the 7th round.

We played it twice, taking 3 minutes and 11 minutes, and it was incredibly easy.

But there were plenty of laughs along the way.

Some people left for food (not me) and the remainder of us played my favourite trick-taking game, Schadenfreude!

Fresh off my Top 50, it was nice to play this one again.

I love the “come closest to 40 without going over” and how the second highest card wins the trick.

I really suck at this game, though I almost did pull this one out.

But it’s so fun that I don’t care!

It was card games galore on this night.

Because next was Of What’s Left, a card game with owls (look at the first letters there…)

This is a card-shedding game where you don’t want to shed too much.

You’re trying to get rid of your cards, but not all of them.

Whoever runs out of cards gets zero points.

If you have cards left in your hand, you get -1 point per card.

However, if you have 5 or fewer cards in your hand, you also score the lowest rank from the cards you still have.

So you could have one card left, but it’s a 10!

That gives you 9 points (10-1).

The lead player plays some cards to the table (a run or set of any length, or maybe just one card).

All the other players have to follow with the same format and number of cards (two-card set, three-card set, three-card run, etc) of a higher value.

It’s an interesting game, and one we didn’t quite get right away, that you don’t actually want to go out. You want to shed a bunch of cards, but then force somebody else to go out.

I really liked this one!

Apparently it’s being rethemed by Bezier Games as Seers Catalog, but this version is definitely very good.

We ended the night with my game that Robin and Jim had wanted to play.

Empire’s End is a game of managed destruction where your empire is crumbling and you are trying to just make sure yours crumbles the least (or that you get a bunch of benefits from your empire crumbling).

I’ve talked about this game in the month where I first played it, and it’s a really fun game (it’s by John D. Clair, so of course it is).

Each turn, disasters will come out that you have to bid on to avoid. But if you take the disasters, while that portion of your empire will be destroyed, you will get a great innovation to add to the still-living parts of your empire.

I really do like this game (I have played it 3 times now, so maybe a review will be coming soon) and part of the reason is that you can work hard to keep your empire going as much as possible, or you can let your empire crumble but get the endgame scoring innovations to get you a ton of points.

The latter is how Robin beat me by 5 points when I did the former.

It was amazing!

I also liked the playing time. I was getting a bit concerned about time because Robin was helping some poor souls try to learn Ark Nova at 8:00 pm before he could come play.

My previous games had been about 90 minutes and that didn’t include the teach!

Yet somehow we finished the entire game and the teach in an hour.

That was even more amazing!

All of us really liked the game, and so this will definitely be a keeper in my collection.

Now we need to get Abi to play it!

That was Saturday night, and another 20-minute trek up the hill to home and bed.

And then early Sunday for the final hours!

Another Tim Horton’s breakfast (sausage breakfast sandwich on a biscuit) was had and then into the convention hall at 9:00 am.

We had a few people arrive early, so why not bring out a 5-player game of Bad Company?

This game is so great, ala Space Base but it has its own unique qualities as well.

Players are criminals doing heists and trying to avoid the police as they attempt to improve the quality of their gang as well.

I love Space Base a bit more than this one, but it’s still a really good game that plays 6 in about an hour and I do love how when you improve your gang, they start getting taller and taller (and even sometimes changing race and/or gender!)

The mechanic of trying to stay ahead of the cop car is good, and I really love how you roll 4 dice, choose two pairs (like in Can’t Stop and then you get to use both pairs while your opponents can only use one of the two to activate their gang.

Yes, I was the Emotional Tacos gang…

I did not do very well this game, but it was still a wonderful time.

Next, with the same four of us at the table as Saturday, we decided to see if we can actually get a game of Kanban finished!

Hence why I didn’t really talk about it before.

This is a game where players are employees at an automobile manufacturer, involved in the process from deciding what designs to build, to sourcing parts and pushing cars through the assembly line, all the way to actually getting those cars into your garage.

It’s a Vital Lacerda game, so you know that it’s going to be complex.

And it definitely is.

I’ll talk more about how it plays in the monthly post, but suffice to say that this one is very crunchy, you have multiple avenues for success, and it was a blast to play.

And not requiring a teach, we got done in a little over 2 hours.

Which isn’t bad!

And I only lost by 1 point!

It was also kind of fitting, as at last year’s TCTC, we played “Kanban Lite” (aka Bot Factory) and it was fun too.

We now had 5 players again (yes, I did skip lunch) so it was time to bring out another old favourite (well, I’ve only played it once but I did enjoy it).

First Rat is a game about rats going to space because they heard the moon was made of cheese (isn’t that more mice than rats? Anyway…)

Each player is a rat family trying to contribute to this by helping build parts of the rocket, hoarding food, bring more family members into the fold, powering up the entire complex, and maybe even actually going to space!

I first played this a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it. I like the mix of the types of actions you can take (it’s only movement along the track, but are you collecting materials for the ship, trying to really power up things, or what?)

I did a power apple core move (moving 28 spaces!) to trigger the endgame and then won by one point. Scores were lower than in my first game, but that was probably because I pushed the end more than happened last time.

There are a few ways to win!

It’s also another quick game, taking about an hour though with setup there’s no way this is a lunchtime game at work.

But it was still a lot of fun.

Finally, to end the day and the weekend, a couple of friends who I hadn’t played with yet all weekend were able to free up some time to play Sagrada with me.

I love this dice game. It’s quick, and you’re chucking lots of dice.

And you’re trying to make a colourful stained glass window.

What’s not to like?

Oh yeah, having your only choices for drafting a die be ones that you can’t fit in your window!

That sucks.

I did terribly this game, but the fun was in the companionship and that was amazing.

I was tired and it had been a long weekend, which is why I completely forgot to take a photo of my window with a hole in it!

What a wonderful weekend this was.

I got to play games with some people I haven’t played games with in eons, along with some games that don’t really make it out to our Sunday game days.

Robin, one of the friends who I haven’t played with in a while, was walking around all weekend handing out The Discard Pile stickers to as many people as he could get to accept them.

Which is great, because it is a great podcast!

If you want to hear intelligent talk about games from a great group of guys, you should check it out.

The stickers apparently got a lot of people to join us on their Discord channel, so that’s a win-win!

It was a great weekend, and I can’t wait until the next one in March 2025.

Of course, there will be some conventions before then, so stay tuned for retrospectives of those.

But I will definitely be at the Vancouver Convention Centre in March 2025.

Unless they move again, of course.

(And I promise not to use “win-win” again for…at least a post or two. Sorry)